Khuded, Songs of Separation: Affective Unmaking of the Stoic Soldier in Kumaoni Military Folklore

Abstract

Challenging the dominant narratives found in official military literature- such as regimental histories and handbooks, battle monographs, official auto/biographies, heroic tales (veer gathas), and doctrinal texts- this paper turns to the vernacular, folkloric tradition of Kumaoni Khuded songs. It argues that these oral performances form an affective counter-archive that preserves the intimate and often overlooked dimension of war. The paper explores the spaces of absence, longing, and kinship ties that bind mountain communities to the figure of the soldier. Primarily, the study examines Khuded (separation) genre of Kumaoni folksongs with four key songs- “Ghughuti Na Basa” by Gopal Babu Goswami which voices a wife’s yearning for her absent soldier-husband; “Tak Taka Tak Kamala” and “Kashmiri Border Pyari” by Fouji Lalit Mohan Joshi, that renders the affective embodied presence of the soldier in service, and “Door Badi Door Barfilo Daan” where a younger sibling prays for his brother’s safety. These selected songs foreground the layered ways in which gender, devotion, and memory shape the cultural imagination of war. Drawing on affect theory and subaltern memory studies, the analysis reveals how these compositions resist the homogenising image of the stoic, nationalised soldier. Instead, Khuded, a military genre of Kumaon, articulates an alternative military literary tradition that privileges vulnerability, emotional endurance, spiritual invocation, and ‘affective economies’ that reveal the entanglement of the personal and the political. In doing so, Kumaoni military folk songs extend the discourse of war beyond the battlefield, inscribing the soldier not merely as an emblem of the nation but as a son, husband, brother, and devotee. This research argues that such songs constitute a vital counter-narrative within cultural memory, offering a more nuanced understanding of how communities internalize and remember war.